


a bridge of sparrows

by elijah_was_a_prophet



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dubious Consent, Kidnapping, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:02:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27076189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elijah_was_a_prophet/pseuds/elijah_was_a_prophet
Summary: If Lino had been smarter, he'd have been worried about the dangers closest to home.
Relationships: Yandere Male Vampire/His Childhood Best Friend
Comments: 6
Kudos: 24
Collections: Fic In A Box





	a bridge of sparrows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ItsPineTime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ItsPineTime/gifts).



Lino Paterlini lived in a gray city on the edge of a lake which spread between the mountains as if it was a sheet of glass, reflecting the heavens in its clear blue eye. From his flat on the far inland edge of town he could only see a fingernail width crescent of visible blue over the towering factories which brooded in a wide industrial belt. He longed to take the metro down to the lakeshore and spend a day at the beach, watching the waves roll in and the tourists sitting under orange and white striped umbrellas. 

It was a Wednesday, so he’d gotten off work at noon instead of the usual six pm, leaving him with an entire afternoon free to sit on the chair in his living room and contemplate the bit of Lake Leuenburger he was allowed to see over the smokestacks of the paper mill. Aside from the lake and the factories, there was a miniature park the size of a house plot where someone had room enough for a single apple tree which only gave small green fruits tasting of paper mill smoke. Plane trees would have been a better fit, but the original owner of the land had been determined that agriculture would thrive in such a filthy place. 

At three pm the phone rang. Thierry Hirsch called Lino every week on Wednesdays and Saturdays, saying that he liked to keep the friendship alive. They’d once lived at the same school in a miserably wet part of the country where every day it had rained hard enough to make small rivers in the street and to soak boys’ shirts to their bodies. 

“Thierry, comment ça?”

“Ah, the same as ever,” Thierry said. “I work, I eat, I sleep. Nothing ever changes in Sainte-Gabriel.”

Sainte-Gabriel was a sunny island to the southeast frequented by vacationers seeking to escape the mountains, who rented their homes to vacationers seeking to escape the ocean. It was a circular route of transit.

“Maybe someday you’ll come back here,” Lino replied.

“Ha! That gray city was never my idea of a good time or a good place. At least down here everyone’s not so droopy and limply awaiting death or retirement.”

“There’s some life,” Lino said. “They had a rock concert in the large park last week, and I could hear it even in my bed.”

He’d gone to bed at eight pm, but he didn’t mention that since it was very sad compared to the life Thierry must be leading down on the coast. In school they'd been a trio, Lino, Thierry and Valentin, but of the three Thierry had always been the handsomest, olive skinned with long black hair. After graduation he’d grown a mustache and run away to drive tour boats, leading a life of one adventure after another. Lino envied him,

“If you were in bed, then you didn’t go,” Thierry laughed. “But you can’t help being boring. Not everybody can be as spontaneous as me. I was walking through downtown the other day and I saw a tattoo parlor. So I got one."

“A tattoo?”

“Two! The mermaid and then a circle of nautical stars with swallows so they know to bury me at sea. A body’s safest in the ocean from vampires and witches.”

Lino frowned, not sure what he was talking about. “You’re safe here.”

“Because all the magic things died of boredom, ha-ha!”

“I don’t appreciate the tone.”

“You need a vacation from there, Lino. Come down and spend a week with me at the beach. You’ll return a changed man, and be happier for it.”

“I don’t want to leave Valentin. He’d get lonely, slumming it down by the scum river with nobody to visit.”

Thierry laughed for several hurtful seconds. “There’s other bums out there. Maybe you’ll make friends with a few on the pier.”

“He needs me,” Lino insisted.

“Suit yourself, you old bastard. Hey! I never found out whatever happened to Eva Evangelista. Have any details there?”

Lino privately lamented the loss of his nap before sighing and beginning the story of how Eva Evangeline Evangelista had scandalized the town recently. It wasn’t hard in the gray city to cause or start trouble, but she’d been specially gifted with this talent since their mutual childhoods and never knew when to stop her troubling and settle down.

“A good scandal does us all good,” Valentin had once said long ago while they’d sat on the roof of the school smoking clove cigarettes. It was one of the short pauses between rains where the air was cold enough to feel cool and refreshing instead of muggy like it was in the summer months.

Wednesdays Lino usually didn’t visit Valentin, since the streets were very quiet and the bars opened early so people were drunk faster, but he missed him quite a bit. Sometimes he’d make the climb down to the scum river and find an empty booth and a note from Valentin saying that he’d had something to do, but that it was fine and he’d be back some other time. 

Valentin didn’t have a job; he kept his living space simply by living in it, a tiny cell by the water downriver of the most populated district but upriver of the water treatment plant. As a result ,it was always filthy and full of litter; the population who lived in the space under the factories sometimes sat on the edge and fished the most valuable trash out. Whenever Lino visited Valentin would hand over things that seemed much too valuable to have been tossed in the water. Possibly he found them elsewhere, but since Lino was the only one of his group to ever see Valentin, it was a mystery as to where he got them. Not even Phoebe who watched the grocery store saw him come in for a chunk of hard cheese or canned heat.

It was no matter. Lino got up, put on his raincoat, and headed down the tall fire escape to go visit.

The entrance to the underground and the free cells was between a shady bar and the back entrance of a butcher’s shop. Pig blood and vomit slicked the steps while the overhanging roofs of the buildings prevented rain from washing it away. Rubber boots were always a wise idea underground, as damp leaked from the walls down from the lake and made slime molds grow.

“Valentin?” Lino spoke at the door to the cell. It was an iron grate set over a sliding wooden panel painted red and treated to resist the damp. The iron flaked away in reddish brown chunks when he touched it.

“Lino!” 

The inner door and the grate were flung aside and Valentin dragged him in, kissing him on both cheeks. He was stronger than almost all of them, even Lino who worked hauling large pieces of machinery in one of the factories.

“You didn’t say you’d be visiting today.”

“You don’t have a phone,” Lino pointed out.

“Hmm, hmm. But usually I know.”

Valentin forced Lino onto a fat red sleeper couch and set the kettle on the hotplate. Everything was one room inside, with a toilet behind a vinyl screen and the kitchen being small enough to fit on two feet of counter. Despite being so small it still managed to be cluttered with things Valentin had picked up. Inside it stayed dry due to two feet of insulation, but was a bit plain, and so most residents decorated the insides of their cells to solidify their claims. Valentin collected pictures from magazines. He had a roll of easy-stick tape, and he used it to put up all sorts of scavenged images.

The wall nearest to Lino was covered in images of himself taken from the newspaper, back in the days when he’d been the wrestling champion of their school. He avoided looking at it and instead studied the magazines covering the table. 

“Is there anything you won’t read?”

“Auto magazines, obituaries, and the stock market. Too depressing.” He poured Lino a gentle cup and then sat next to him on the couch, hands folded in his lap. “So! Will you be coming out to the night carnival this weekend?”

“If I have time.”

Valentin put on a face of exaggerated sadness. “You say that every week. And then you never come.”

“Phoebe might invite me to the theater.”

“Phoebe.” He said it flatly, not as a question.

“What?”

“I didn’t know you go around with her, that’s all.”

“She likes weird theater, though,” Lino said. “So I might not go.”

“And sleep in your bed instead, because you never come to the night carnival,” Valentin finished. “I know. You curl up under your blue quilt and dream about whatever you dream about, while I walk all alone and wonder if this will be the week you keep to your promise.”

“I- Valentin, I’m just not comfortable there. It’s not a safe place for my kind.”

“You think you’re not safe, you try going out on the street with me.”

The silence fell down between them. Lino understood that vampires were greatly feared, but the night carnival filled him with a special kind of dread. It was a place where the dead walked among the living and living people went missing. They’d even known a boy in their second to last year who’d been found in pieces around the old flowering trees, scattered by a witch in preparation for some dark ritual to bring the spring back again. That kind of thing was just too much for Lino, who dealt in solid reality and places which didn’t reek of death.

“I suppose, if you took me, it might be alright to go,” Lino conceded. “But only if you stay by my side the entire night.”

“Leaving you alone at the night carnival would be a terrible thing to do, Lino. You have my word.”

Valentin continued to talk for some time, stretching his hands out to touch Lino’s knees and leaning their heads in close enough to touch. His skin was very cold, and waxy. When they’d all first met, Valentin had already been a vampire, but vampire children matured differently as they aged, faces softening into an androgynous cut and voices hovering somewhere around a contralto. Vampires were gorgeous, and had they not been so deadly, people would have been using all of them as models and dancers and other forms of display-human.

The bell tower chimed six pm. Lino stood to give his legs a break.

“I’ll have to be getting home for dinner. Saturday evening I’ll be back, alright?”

Valentin kissed him on both cheeks. “I’ll be waiting.”

Work continued to proceed. Lino lifted things off one heavy shelf and put them on another. Someday his broad back would give out, but he couldn’t worry about such a thing or else it would give him chest pains. The warehouse was attached to a incinerator, to burn packaging, damaged product, and the trash that came from the workshop in the attic, and it produced such a massive quantity of heat that the building steamed when rain hit it. 

“Lino!” his shift supervisor yelled.

“Yessir?”

“Shirts on! Company policy!”

Lino sighed and untied his shirt from around his head. It was more useful as a bandana to keep his sweat out of his eyes than as a garment, but company policy was company policy. They made everyone shave their heads, to reduce the fire and parasite risk, and they made them all eat their lunch in the stairwell so they wouldn’t track rain in from the outside.

It was almost quitting time on a Friday and Lino pushed through, heat sinking under his skin, dizzy and a bit dehydrated, picking things up and moving them along. A forklift would have been nice, but forklifts were for the nicer warehouses and not warehouses that made tourist trash for the lakeside shops.

At the whistle blow, Lino grabbed all his things and shuffled quickly down to the corner grocery store where Phoebe kept watch, as he hadn’t talked to her for several days and he knew she was probably bursting with news.

“Look at what the cat dragged in,” Phoebe drawled when he shouldered his way through the door. She opened the cabinet under the counter and pulled out a brown paper package. “Eva came through.”

Lino grinned. “How good is it?”

“Double-wrapped because the smell was so strong. I think someone’s growing it in their basement.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, it’s the good stuff.”

One of the hardest to come by commodities in the gray city was angel’s heart mushrooms. Usually in such damp places it would be easy to find fungi, but angel’s heart had specific substrate and warmth requirements that were hard to achieve in the plain open air barns most mushrooms were grown in. When fully mature they smelled intensely sweet and musky, making their other most common use (besides psychoactive recreation) an ingredient in very expensive women’s perfumes. The smell was one that Lino loved to have in his home, and so he frequently burned them until the entire apartment was a cloud of smoke.

“How much, then?” he said to Phoebe.

She shrugged. “They’re asking for more than money. Whatcha got?”

“Nothing on me right now, but if you give me-“

“-a day, then you’ll still have nothing and I won’t be an allowed distributor. Seriously, Lino, I can’t play with my hustle like this.”

“Not even a day. An hour. There’s something in my apartment I could get for you.”

Phoebe sighed and put the package back under the counter. “An hour flat, and then I’m shopping it around.”

Lino ran the entire way to his apartment and back, returning with something Valentin had given him. A perfect carved amber pendant hung alongside a golden eagle feather and three pieces of punched silver on a plain steel chain. 

“Curios,” Phoebe sniffed.

“Valuables. And I got at least sixty-five livre.”

“Fine. Hand it all over and lemme check it first.”

“Can I get a can of cola, too?”

She plonked vanilla-lime and the package of angel’s heart on the counter before waving him away. He took it, walking slower back to his apartment now that the energy expenditure of his earlier run was hitting him. But a solid pound of angel’s heart was worth it. He hadn’t found any in months, and even the dish he burnt it in had stopped smelling so sweet after the first six weeks.

Lighting the first ounce was so good he took a cold shower and then didn’t make dinner, just lay on his bed and dozed off breathing warm smoke. Had he had other obligations? Probably not, because nothing much ever happened in his life, and even if he did, a hard rain was beginning to fall. Underneath several piles of blankets he drifted off to sleep, and didn’t wake until well into the next morning.

Lino would have kept sleeping had a large weight not been sitting on his chest in the dawn, smelling of damp moss and cold slimy things.

“Lino,” Valentin whispered from his vantage point. “Lino, you betrayed me again.”

“Huh?”

“The night carnival, Lino. We were going to go last night.”

Lino rubbed his eyes, trying to understand what Valentin was saying and excuse it in the same breath. “It was a long day, and I was tired, and I just got home and forgot.”

“You always forget!”

Valetnin’s hand dug hard into Lino’s shoulder, hard enough that it threatened the bones. Lino tried to toss him off but Valentin had always been the strongest of all of them. It wasn’t dangerous yet, though. This was one vampire he knew, even if it was a pissed one, and therefore Lino could reason with him.

“You’re hurting me.”

Valentin’s smile was pointed. “Good.”

“Valentin, it’s not-“

“Shut up,” Valentin snapped.

Lino tried to throw him off again, but was still held motionless. He looked at the clock. Around 10 am, so people still sitting up in their beds were probably few and far between. His phone was somewhere in the pocket of his pants, which he had tossed to the side before getting into bed, and nobody was scheduled to visit or call that day.

Lino remembered how in school they’d talked about how to deal if a vampire or witch or other sort of unusual friend gave into their instincts. Risk mitigation, they’d called it, or the art of saving your own skin when a familiar-looking wolf set upon the sheep. The vampire section had always assumed that if a situation arose, it’d be because of the scent of blood or some violent confrontation, not being a perpetual flake.

Lino grimaced. “I’m sorry.”

“If you were that sorry, you’d quit skipping out on me. I do so much for you, Lino, and you can’t do one thing for me. I waited for you at the entrance for an hour, and then checked back every hour to see if you’d been lost. I searched for your scent down every street in case you’d shown up early and been taken. All the while you were in this room getting high and forgetting about me.”

“You could-“ The words ‘have called’ died in Lino’s mouth as he remembered that Valentin didn’t have a phone. “You could have come looking for me.”

“Fuck that. I’m done worrying about you.”

Lino frowned. “You worry?”

“I fucking worry all the time, because you drive me crazy. I have to sit and wait for you to visit while you go do whatever, go to the theater, lay around in your house, go to work, get off work and get drinks, live a life aboveground, do everything that I can’t. You are driving me crazy.”

Valentin’s hands were shaking and Lino grew concerned. “It’s alright. I promise to be safer from now on, look out for whatever’s out there to get me.”

“You can’t see half of it. You don’t know what’s trying to kill you, and I love you too much to wait around for it.”

Hearing that was like a blow to the chest, and when Lino spoke again it was quieter. “You love me?” 

“What do you think I broke in for?”

The window had been shattered, Lino realized. He picked his head up enough to see the broken glass and then lay back down. So. He’d managed to piss off a vampire, but the vampire was concerned about him. It was at least better than getting all his blood sucked out through his neck or whatever else pissed and angry vampires did. 

“We’re going to a safe house,” Valentin said. “What stuff do you want to bring?”

“Valentin, I can’t leave, I have-“

“A job you hate and rent you’re behind on and everything here reeks of hot garbage. Come with me, Lino. It’ll be better.”

“In the sewers.”

“In the countryside. There’s a- well, it’d take too long to explain. But it’s nice, and it’s mine. So you’d better. I’m making the decision for you.”

“I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“Just for a few days. Remember I love you.”

The guilt of having been a flake for the whatever number of weeks in a row broke Lino. He could tell his boss he was a day or two off, since he had the time, and the countryside sounded amazing at this time of year. Quit being a boring person, for once.

“Alright, you’ve got me. How far away is this place?”

“Far enough.”

Finally Valentin released his grip and weight, jumping off Lino to start sticking things in his backpack and mumbling about transit. Lino went slower, making a cup of coffee and showering the last of the angel’s heart haze away. When he felt awake enough to function he tied on sturdy boots and grabbed an old hiking backpack from secondary school.

“Will anybody else be there?” Lino asked.

“No, just you and me.” Valentin looked quite pleased by the fact.

They took a rail an hour out of the gray city, then a cable car across the Forsberg Gorge onto the western slopes of the mountains around the lake. From the station, Valentin lead Lino onto a barely paved path to a village, a walk of about twenty minutes, before stopping at the town store.

“Do you want to come in?” Valentin said.

“I’m fine here. The weather’s nice.”

In the middle of fall the leaves turned and fell off the trees, so brilliant as to set the entire mountain alight with reds and oranges and yellows. Away from the smog, the air was like a bright quartz crystal, crisp and cooling. There was a reason that residents of the hot muggy lowlands and the beaches where the sand burned fiery-hot liked to spend a spell in the mountains.

The path grew only more beautiful as they walked out of town and into the remote areas, down a dirt path underneath the trees and the bright leaves of wild grapes whose fruit had fallen weeks before. It smelled of wet moss and leaf litter, the only animals fat squirrels and a vole sitting on a tree stump.

“It’s lovely up here,” Lino said.

“That’s why I brought you.”

They stopped suddenly at the foot of a large cliff. Someone had leaned a sheet of plywood against the rock face, and Valentin shoved it over to reveal a metal door.

“An old bunker?”

“Vampires know all the locations. They’re good if you don’t like the sun, and nobody else wants them because they think they’re gloomy. I think this one is nice.”

Valentin swung the massive vault door open and guided Lino in. The darkness was complete and stifling. Lino felt around for a light switch but found nothing, instead stumbling over his own feet when Valentin pushed him.

“The fuck was that for?” Lino asked, indignant.

“I’m trying to close the door.”

Vampires could see perfectly in the dark. Never be alone in the dark with a vampire, they’d taught at school. At the time Lino had scoffed (Valentin was a lovely roommate, and it wasn’t all the way dark If your blinds were bent to let in the light), but now the fear seemed to make more sense. He crawled to his feet and continued to look for the light switch.

He couldn’t find the wall. 

Valentin was walking around, by the noise of his steps, but it wasn’t loud enough for Lino to track. There was shag carpeting on the floor that kept it muffled. 

“Valentin?”

“I’m going to guide you to your room. Hold my hand.”

“Where’s the light?”

“Funny thing about the bunkers. Once the Tripartite Nuclear Disarmament treaty was signed construction was stopped, their usefulness was brought into question by a world that no longer feared nuclear war. This one was only missing one thing when they abandoned it.”

“Valentin, I swear to god, just please turn the light on.”

“There is no light, Lino. They abandoned this one before it could be wired for electricity.”

Lino turned and ran for where he thought the door was, only to be tackled around the waist.

“You don’t get to leave now, lovely. Nobody can hear you. Three feet of solid concrete on all sides. And I’m the only person who knows the combination to the door.” The rasp of his breath was damp and warm on Lino’s neck.

Lino kept fighting, even when Valentin grabbed him by the hair and dragged him down to some part of the bunker before tossing him in and locking that door, too. It was silent. Crawling around on his hands and knees, he found only a foam mattress, a chemical toilet, and a blanket. The carpet was solidly tacked down at all corners. He stood but couldn’t touch a single vent, and the door was metal and bolted from the outside instead of the inside. The only possible opening was a sliding slot on the bottom third, but even if he rattled it open there would have only been room to stick his arm out- an arm too short to reach up and undo the bolt. It was a perfect entrapment system. 

The door didn’t give way when he kicked it. Or when he punched it. He screamed for a bit, but that did nothing but make his throat hurt. All he had with him was the clothes on his back and his shoes.

“I promise I’ll stay safe,” Lino said to the door. He wasn’t sure if Valentin could hear him or not. It might have been a test to see how long it’d take him to break. But he could endure. Working ten hours in a warehouse with no air conditioning had made him able to withstand a lot of things. And this wasn’t physically strenuous, just freaky and confusing. No pain, though, except for his foot from where he’d kicked the door and his hand from where he’d punched it.

“Valentin, I’m sorry. Please open the door.”

In the dark he kept imagining things touching him, and it made him jump. There couldn’t be bugs in such a closed place but if there were- he wouldn’t be able to see him. His skin crawled. 

After what must have been several hours Lino fell asleep on the mattress. He awoke and thought it was night, then remembered that there was no way to tell. In the endless blackness, time was meaningless. On his hands and knees he made his way to the blanket, pulling it over his head and curling into a ball on the mattress. 

It was so quiet he could hear the sand-on-velvet sound of the blood in his ears moving around. It made him shiver, the sound of fabric scraping together deafening in the deep dark. Lino pressed his palm to his own heart to check the beat and to feel his own chest rise and fall. It didn’t matter if he opened or closed his eyes, since both options showed only fuzzy black nothingness.

Lino awoke when the small door into his cell opened, and the smell of tomato soup wafted in.

“It’s time to eat,” Valentin said.

Lino crawled over and felt for a bowl.

“Where is it?”

“Where’s what?” Valentin asked.

“My food.”

“You don’t get to feed yourself right now. I can’t trust you to eat on your own.”

One of Valentin’s cool hands snaked inside the cell and grabbed Lino by the chin, pulling his face down to the little door’s level. A straw was pressed to his lips.

Well, at least he wasn’t being spoon fed. Lino took the soup and then sat back, straining to see anything other than the same featureless dark. The little door closed and he was alone again.

Valentin only said that it was time to eat when he fed Lino, instead of dinner or lunch. Time might as well not have passed in the little cell. There was only the walls that Lino could touch if he stretched out, and periods of sleeping broken up by dreams of something sitting on his chest and wrapping its arms around his waist. 

The visuals got worse. Instead of the normal patterns there were hands and faces. Pale hands and faces that sometimes touched him but disappeared into mist when he tried to touch him back. He had a dream Thierry was calling for their Saturday visit, could feel the plastic cradle of the receiver in his hand, but when he turned over the illusion broke. Being asleep and being awake were the same thing, now. If something was with Lino then he knew it wasn’t real. Things weren’t real outside the darkness, anymore.

Then Lino woke up and there were arms around his chest, and a mouth at the back of his neck, lightly kissing him.

“Valentin?” Lino asked, uncertain. 

“Good, you woke up.”

Valentin’s hands were sweet, and Lino pressed into the contact. “How long has it been?”

“I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

“Since we went into the bunker.”

“More than a day, but less than a year. That’s the most I can say.” He kissed Lino on the side of the neck and then up to his cheek. “Can you kiss me back?”

Lino faltered. “That’s weird.”

“We’ve kissed before.”

They had kissed before, back when they’d slept right near each other in their old school and Valentin had brought up how there was a way to do it properly and they’d better practice. He’d bit Lino’s bottom lip open when they did it, lapping up the tiny trail of blood it left with dilated eyes and a smile.

Maybe that should have been a portent of things to come. Lino didn’t know how he felt about kissing Valentin, because it wasn’t really an area of his psyche he explored too often. Awkward first kisses aside, there had never been strong attraction like the kind he’d felt back in second year when he’d dated Phoebe and gotten to second base in the prop closet.

“I don’t know if I have those sorts of feelings,” Lino said.

“It’s not about feelings, it’s about doing what feels good. This should feel good, after being alone for so long.”

Valentin kissed Lino on the mouth, slow and hard. His tongue was cold and stiff and he hooked it behind every one of Lino’s teeth. It was a bizarre feeling. His hips moved with the kiss, grinding Lino into the mattress, and his dick was hard.

“Want to use your mouth,” he whispered in Lino’s ear. “Want to get up around your shoulders and fuck it. But not now.”

Lino wasn’t sure what made him go breathless when he replied. “When?”

“When I feel like it. You’re still so nervous, Lino.”

“Because I can’t fucking see anything!”

“Relax. You don’t need to see. I can be your eyes.” Valentin stroked the side of Lino’s face while kissing him, fangs pressed out from having blood so near. “I want to drink your blood. Have for ages. Every time I got close, though, you froze up and got so scared. It tastes different when the victim is scared, and I didn’t like that. So I left you and your perfect neck alone.”

“If you aren’t drinking from me, then who?” He thought about tourists, stumbling back to their hotels drunk and disoriented. Teenagers out late. People chasing a high. So many vulnerable necks, all in one city. 

“Sources. State providers. I want a blood source of my own, though. Someone to keep in my arms who I alone get to drink from. Even when we were young I dreamed that it might be you.”

“You never said a word.” Lino thought about Valentin, kissing his cheeks and holding him in greeting. How close those fangs came to his neck without piercing them. How nobody ever touched Valentin except for Lino, who was allowed to hang off him like a limpet.

“Because I could sense your fear. You’re scared of the dark because you don’t know what’s in it. But it’s just me. Sitting here. Waiting. When I crack the door open I can hear your heartbeat. It speeds up whenever you hear my voice.”

“Someone’s going to come looking for me, and then you’ll have to explain why you kidnapped me. I must have missed at least one call with Thierry.”

“You’ve missed more than one. He doesn’t really care about you, Lino. Nobody out there does. I’m the only one who loves you enough to try and keep you safe. They’d all watch you break your back if they could.”

“You’re lying!” He’d seen Phoebe the day before he left. Thierry was supposed to call the afternoon Valentin took him to this place. They wouldn’t just forget about him, like he didn’t matter.

“No, you just don’t like the truth.”

Valentin reached down, shoving fabric out of the way to grab both their cocks in his hand and gently stroke them, thumbnail pressing into Lino’s frenulum. It hurt in a strange and erotic way, making his gasp and throw his head back. The line of his neck stretched long and Valentin struck.

Vampire bites didn’t sting, they burned.

. 

Lino screamed. Nobody could hear him. Valentin pushed him down with all his weight and started to feed, teeth working the wound wider so a torrent of fresh, hot blood could rush into his mouth. Lino grabbed at Valentin’s shoulder, sinking his nails in to try and distract from the pain and the overwhelming blaze of adrenaline and endorphins and cortisol flowing in his veins. While he fed, Valentin continued to jerk Lino off, cock squeezed hard enough to be painful.

“Fuck!” Lino shouted, rocking side to side. He wasn’t sure if he was about to orgasm or pass out. Vampires often had some sort of venom, and Lino had never bothered to ask Valentin if he did or not despite their close relationship. He never thought he’d get bit, for one.

The feeding was only a short one, and when he was finished, Valentin licked the wounds closed with coagulant spit and pressed them down with the edge of the blanket. He’d come just from drinking blood, but Lino hadn’t and it left him frustrated.

“Stay still, I don’t want to bite you,” Valentin said. He licked the curve of Lino’s hip with his wet cold tongue, slid it down into the soft juncture between inner thigh and the base of his balls. There was a soft nip there, enough to make Lino jerk, and then Valentin took his cock in his mouth.

Maybe back when they were two boys too close to one another he’d have wanted this. All the years they were in school together he’d sometimes found himself watching Valentin’s lovely mouth when he spoke, tiny points of fangs behind his normal teeth, pink lips and the soft curve of his jawline to his smooth neck. He’d always been the pretty one, feminine enough that Lino could jack off thinking about putting him on his knees and pretend that it wasn’t something more.

“Did you know?” Lino panted while he lived out his old masturbatory fantasy. “You were so pretty like a girl when we were teenagers. I wanted you.”

“Pretty like a girl, when we had girls you could go out with? If you’d wanted a woman, you’d still be chasing Phoebe.” As Valentin talked his cold breath brushed across Lino’s dick, hovering, teasing.

“Keep going, please.”

“Not until you answer me. Why did you want me, if you only wanted women and knew I was a man?”

“You were so beautiful. Still are. I could watch you for hours, out running on the field, hair behind you- but even Theirry with his long hair didn’t do half as much for me.”

That made Valentin hum and put his mouth back on Lino’s cock, hands spreading his thighs as wide as they would go with his pants around his knees. It wasn’t that different from sex with the lights off, although Lino did wish he could see Valentin’s face. He trembled when he came, shaking through what was one of his best orgasms in a long while. 

Then Valentin left without saying anything, and Lino was alone in the dark.

It seemed like a longer time than usual between the next however many meals, based on how hungry Lino got between them. He hoped he hadn’t made Valentin mad, more out of a sense of self-preservation than concern for their friendship. That had been well-torched at this point. Sometimes he thought he heard other people’s voices calling to him, and when he lay very still, the same hallucinations of a train came through his room. Now he could see it without closing his eyes, the wind in his hair and the valley below him. 

They’d gone on those train rides once a month to let the students go about freely in the town. The administration let them skip down the cobblestones and buy what they wanted with parents’ allowances or the small state-required stipend, for students who did domestic work while paying tuition. Lino hadn’t ever had much, since his dishwashing job was to cover the cost of room and board, but Evie had been given enough money to buy them all lunch overlooking the waterfall and the pine trees which bend to accommodate it.

Lying on his foam mattress, Lino saw the massive pane window again. Valentin’s hand had pressed over his as he leaned to look out at the fishermen at the pool at the base and on the river, the shack where people could rent bright yellow kayaks and go whitewater boating. 

It’d cost twenty livre for an hour, but a student card gave a ten percent discount so it’d be, well, whatever minus ten percent was. Math had become almost impossible to do. It was as if Lino’s brain was encased in tar and cotton, stretching and struggling and straining to put basic concepts together without falling apart. Forget keeping track of time, Lino could hardly count to twenty. And the long-term memories he’d made, of passages of prose and poetry, were also fading. He couldn’t remember the school anthem, nor any of the hymns he’d once had memorized from choir.

Valentin. That was the one thing he could remember. Not the warmth of another body or the sun, but his old best friend who needed him so much he’d never left the gray city. Valentin who knew what he was doing when he locked Lino in a room with nothing to do but lie down and think. 

Suddenly, Lino stood and began to run in place. He had to keep his body moving. At least his strength had stayed, even if he seemed to tire easier than before, and if he lost that then there’d be no chance of freedom. If there was such a chance. Maybe it was his fate to stay in the bunker, to remain Valentin’s unwilling blood source. The wounds on his neck ached when sweat fell into them. They were hot to the touch, possibly infected.

Lino lay down and slept. His body reeked of dried sweat and oil. The pillow he laid his head on needed a wash. And his clothes were the same ones he’d been wearing the day Valentin took him from the city. But there was no way to get clean ones, since Valentin ignored anything Lino said that he didn’t like.

He dreamed of water all night, and of the shower he’d taken the day he left. Such things were far away now.

Three meals later, Lino was allowed to leave the room. 

Not to the outside world, of course, but after sliding into Lino’s bed and slowly jacking him off Valentin had left the door open and said that it was alright for Lino to wander around, as long as he went back into his room when told.

“There’s a shower in the room next to yours. You reek.”

And whose fault is that, Lino had wanted to say, but he’d held his tongue as to not compromise his freedom. Stepping under the hot water was disorienting, but better than the same horizontal position he’d been holding for so long. And the soap! He latched on to this new form of stimulation, slippery and fresh smelling and firm to grasp. 

“You’ve been in here a while,” Valentin said when he stepped in the shower with him. “Better hurry up.”

“It hasn’t been long,” Lino protested.

“Hasn’t it?”

Lino didn’t know, so he turned the water off and stood there, dripping. Valentin’s teeth caressed the back of his neck and he leaned into them, old bites on his shoulders and ribs aching from the movement. When he took, Valentin took hard, down to the bone and bloody.

“I think about you when you were fifteen,” Lino said. “I can’t reconcile that soft-eyed fifteen year old with what you are now.”

“I’m a vampire. It’s in my nature. You can’t say you weren’t warned.” He spoke slowly, as if he thought Lino didn’t already know.

“Sometimes I miss you before you began drinking human blood. I wonder if I’d still have loved you if we’d met later.”

“You love me?” Valentin bit the end off, bitterly.

“I loved the Valentin I knew. I can’t say I love you now.”

Valentin growled low in his throat. “If you didn’t love me then you wouldn’t have kept returning to that cell by the sewers. Admit it, Lino, you’re a weak man for me.”

“I’ve been forced into this position. Intimidated. I came here willingly, but you gave me false conditions.”

“No. I told you there would be safety here, and you agreed. Anything past that is your own fault. All I wanted was to keep you away from things that would hurt you-“

“What things! You keep repeating that, but I’ve never been in danger a day in my life.”

“From me.”

Lino’s voice wavered. “This is a ridiculous conversation to be having in the shower. Get me some clothes.”

Instead of answering, Valentin took Lino by the hand and led him to a more open room, sitting him down on a couch or divan. The fabric was rough on Lino’s skin and he drew all of his limbs in close, unsure where the open air ended and wall began. In the new space, he was unmoored and frightened.

“No clothes?”

“It’s dark, so no one can see you, and if you get cold there’s a blanket in your room.”

“You can see me.”

“Nothing I’ve never seen before. And it helps, being able to see all of your body. While you were in the city it was dangerous to be near me. Here everything is fine.”

“Why? Are the other vampires really going to hurt me to try and hurt you?”

“They have nothing to do with it. I was so very close to tearing out your throat and draining your entire body of blood. I cannot stand to see you interact with other people. They don’t know you as well as I do, and I see how you try to connect with them but only get rejected. I don’t want their vile hands on someone I regard as my favorite and my food supply.”

Lino shifted on the couch. “Was there any way I could have prevented this?”

“Been less charming, I suppose. It’s natural for a vampire to want to put their food somewhere that it won’t have to be shared. I love you, Lino, and that’s why I have to keep you where I can feel secure enough to let you stay alive.”

To keep his hands from shaking, Lino pressed them to his thighs, but nothing could stop him from beginning to cry. He surprised himself with it, as he usually managed to keep a stoic demeanor. However there really was no escape at this point. Valentin wasn’t going to let him out. And the isolation had worn him down to a frail tissue paper construction.

“Don’t cry,” Valentin whispered. “I’ve met others in this situation. You get used to it. Once I’m done having to be cruel, I might even let you spend time in the sunlight again.”

“How long has it been? Since you put me in here,” Lino said. He pressed his feet into the floor, ready to dash if Valentin got upset again.

“I’m not sure. Three weeks, maybe? Your job called and I told them you quit. Nobody else did.”

“That can’t be true.”

“I’m not. See, here. Look for yourself.”

Even on the lowest brightness setting Lino’s phone scalded his eyes when he looked at it. November 2nd, 2017. Well past when Valentin had guessed. Tears still streaming down his face, he tapped to the call history and looked.

Last call, September 7th, 2017, with Thierry. He hadn’t even bothered to check in for their biweekly visits, the ones Lino always started. There were a few missed text messages, but they all dated back over two weeks.

“Nobody cares, except for me.” Valentin took the phone away and laid it on the table, returning the room to quiet darkness. “I’m here for you.”

He kissed up the side of Lino’s face where his tears flowed the heaviest, down to the corner of his mouth and onto his lips. Lino let him, then let him slide his tongue into his mouth and press him sideways onto the couch. It seemed inevitable, that Valentin might want to open him up and fuck him, but he’d thought it would be a rough affair in his sleep. Kidnappers usually weren’t gentle when they turned their victims facedown and slid their hands around their waists.

“Ever done this?” Valentin asked.

“To myself. Just a few times, to try it. Was okay.”

“I’ll make it very good for you.”

He started by dragging his fangs down Lino’s back and ass, not hard enough to break the skin but enough to get the blood flowing and his pulse up. In the soft folds of skin at the top of Lino’s thighs he left two quick bites, deep and clean punctures that he then licked at for a while. The purpose was unclear until the post-feeding wave of endorphins and oxytocin hit and Lino melted into the couch. His head was very heavy and his emotions were well wrung, and he didn’t have the strength to fight when Valentin slid inside him.

“Feeling good?”

“Mmm.”

It was there, and that’s all Lino could say for it. Valentin was a gentle fuck. Instead of thrusting hard he straddled Lino and rubbed his shoulders while rolling his hips, a gentle, two-part massage. It felt vaguely good.

“A little higher on the left?”

“Got you.”

At least it was the most he’d been touched since arriving at the bunker. The sensation of being warm and full and held lulled him right to sleep, an easy one where he didn’t dream.

Lino awoke on his foam mattress wrapped in fresh smelling sheets. From outside his room came the soft noise of someone singing to themselves.

“Valentin?” he called.

“Out here.”

His door had been left open. Lino stood and made his way out, relying on touch to avoid hitting the walls. A tiny blue campstove flame was lit on the counter.

“I’m making breakfast. Can you find the table?”

Lino felt carefully, inching across the floor with his arms stretched out to grab the chair and sit down. The wood was cold on his junk.

“Why’s my door open?”

“I decided I can trust you. There’s no way for you to run away, and if I leave you in the cell too long your muscles will quit working.”

“No lights.”

“I wasn’t lying when I said that this place wasn’t wired for electricity.” He sat next to Lino and squeezed a fork into his hand. “Try not to poke yourself.”

When he chewed quietly he could hear Valentin breathing and nothing else. He imagined his old apartment in the city, surrounded by people and the noises of their everyday lives. Hot sunshine and hard driving rain. Cars on the street, food cooking, tourists on the open air trolley cars that only tourists took. The roar of the incinerator and the yelling of the foreman. He could feel these things, however distantly, even though they no longer existed to him.

“How long are we going to stay here?”

Valentin paused. “I don’t know. It’s safe enough. I think you’ll like it, after a time.”

Lino finished his eggs and sat, fork listing to the side in his hand. There was nothing more to be said, was there? He blinked until his eyes grew wet and then lay his head down on the table. 

Valentin was still talking. “If you want, I could burn some angel’s heart- you like that, don’t you? It makes a place smell like home.”

“Home.” The word sounded hollow in Lino’s mouth.

He was home. In the dark, he was home. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to Ictus for the beta!


End file.
